ABSTRACT
Lyric reflexivity is everywhere indissociable from Dante’s presentation of the Empyrean, since Paradise proper is beyond representation. We can only chart the ways of representation that Dante employs in order to suggest—working under its impress—what lies beyond representation. We can do so only in exemplary readings of the lyrical quality of language in the Paradiso. Light and love together comprehend and make up the consistency of the Empyrean in self-reflective ways that the Epilogue undertakes to refract.
The Epilogue turns back to reading the poem and assessing some of its distinctive stylistic features in order to illustrate the enrichment that is gained through the foregoing theoretical reflections. The imageries of water and light, sea and sky, serve magnificently to represent a reflective medium in which all is one, yet with infinitely varying degrees of depth and intensity all throughout. Self-reflexivity transcends all bounds and structures and absorbs subjectivity itself into a higher synthesis that contains and conditions all our knowing, yet without being knowable in itself. Reflexivity turned back on itself can produce purely formal correlates in finite terms for the infinite and formless.
